would you like a Fab bar or a Milky stick lolly?
I think our memories from childhood are pretty much souped the moment we hit 18, Or 20, or start to mingle with people older than we are on a regular basis. That is, we stop seeing others as being older or younger than us in scholastic terms and start seeming them as people. It’s at that point that we forget a lot of what we’ve acquired over the past 10 years of life.
Then we find our books, kids’ paperbacks from that time and you remember stuff. Where you read this one, what you were doing when you read that one. How you lent that one to Jenny Knowles and when it came back it looked like she’d given it to her cat to play with. I knew certain smells or movies, or of course photos can invoke nostalgia. But I didn’t think books could to that same degree.
Wow, how wrong was I about that one!
I actually ordered a book on amazon from my childhood, cheap at under £4 and entitled ‘The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler’ it’s kinda make my mouth drop open in shock at how much I remember about it. Not least of all due to the snarky dialogue that Tyke speaks, abrasive and acerbic which is impressive for a character whose 10 or 11 years old.
Written in 1977 I first read it ten years later. I’m reading it now in 2012 and it’s apparent to how different it is. Not least because of the greater freedom kids that age at that time had, speaking as a child of the eighties, as well as the lack of stuff. iPods, computers, smartphones. One car per household if you’re lucky. And teachers who could say “We shall keep you all here till we get some answers!” without having the parents ring the police and RSPCC storming the gates like a scene out of Lord of the Rings.
It actually made me laugh when Danny and Tyke go and find sheep bones in the nearby weir. Can you imagine that happening now?
First the weir would be completely fenced off with steel fencing and un-climbable paint. Then if a sheep’s remains were found in it there would be an immediate health scare for the surrounding area lest the toxins from the sheep got into the water system, and anyone who ‘saw’ the dead sheep would have mandatory consoling to help them ‘heal’ from the shocking discovery.
It could make the evening news. And if anyone from the area made it onto reality teevee they could use their grim history as inspiration for their performance.
The above line I blame on the above book for influencing my opinion and snarky speech patterns I inflict on the rest of society.
What do I remember about primary school?
Well, in the UK from 1984-90 it really was a case of midnight blue snorkel parkas which caused a big stir due to their ability to kill children crossing the road, learning to write lower case joined up writing, doing a voluntary science project with 4 other children from my class in my last year, swimming all hours of the day and night, two trips to a week-long summer camp and seeing how the school computer worked as we used it to do number puzzles with its blocky day-glow graphics.
Oh and there was a small fire in the portecabin one day.
And the snow in 1988. And hanging upside down from the steel frames of the cabins railings.
And just running about; Running, Playtime meant belting around hell-for-leather. Making up stories with my friends about anything and everything, and doing our own versions of the cartoons that were big at the time, Dungeons & Dragons, Thundercats, Jem. And covering each other in stickyweed - a weed that grew by the fence of the playground. And wrestling, and football, and hopscotch, tag, skipping, rounders.
We also had this red and black plastic mechano - the only way I can describe it - you could put it together with screws and a little plastic spanner, but these bits could make a really strong play-area for the littler kids. They loved it.
Our official outside play area was between the primary school and the nearby secondary school. The Ridings, in the nineties it was almost as bad as a Californian young-offenders institute, now it’s an Academy. The area was the cricket nets sans nets. So just a series of piped frameworks sunk into concrete then? Yep. But we still climbed up to the top of those pipes, dangling perilously above the grey stuff that could smash our heads in if we fell.
We didn’t fall. We just didn’t. you learnt not to. If in doubt, don’t climb up there in the first place.
When we used to go on swimming trips to the local baths. We could all swim, me and another girl Helen Church could ‘really’ swim so we were doing our own thing down the deep ends of the pool while the rest of the class learned doggy-paddling. I remember the first pool we went in was a weird ‘above ground’ affair. The local one, again shared with the secondary school and the village was unfinished so we went to one a few minutes’ drive away. Next to a hill with a tree at the top me and my friends got into trouble for wandering off - it was a habit when I was little - but when we got inside the poolhouse it was a little bizarre. You had to walk up steps to get into the water because the pool itself was at eyelevel. According to my mom the name of the place was Brockridge. One of South Gloucestershire’s many swimming pools that we run down to ruin in the late eighties and never redeveloped.
The biggest bit about any trip was the coaches. These were just standard seventies coaches with brown upholstery and no seat belts.
While not as bad as highschool transport - they were minibuses with bench seating, you sat facing each other with all your gear in the middle, no seatbelts, if we’d crashed it would’ve become a meatgrinder - it was still unbelievable no one thought of safety for the children in question. I’m still surprised UK buses don’t have seatbelts as standard, especially the two level ones. They flip or go under a low bridge and it really can be lights out for all on board.
Christmas parties, school assembly and plays that everyone was involved in, even the kids who couldn’t act (like me for example).
We didn’t have computers. Heck, we didn’t even have compulsory homework! We had projects to do, and I remember having all my friends over one summer doing some project on gardens and pond life. all five of us around the dining table scribbling, drawing and writing stuff longhand. I had books, dolls, GI Joes, and stuffed animals as toys. I think even then I was making up stories about things. We all have invisible worlds inside us, mine came to life when I went into my grandpa’s garden prior to his death in 1987, overgrown as it was.
This was better than growing up over the last ten years.
There’s more safety but less freedom. I don’t know if that’s a good exchange but I’m glad I got to experience The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler first-hand, rather than just read about it.
Then we find our books, kids’ paperbacks from that time and you remember stuff. Where you read this one, what you were doing when you read that one. How you lent that one to Jenny Knowles and when it came back it looked like she’d given it to her cat to play with. I knew certain smells or movies, or of course photos can invoke nostalgia. But I didn’t think books could to that same degree.
Wow, how wrong was I about that one!
I actually ordered a book on amazon from my childhood, cheap at under £4 and entitled ‘The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler’ it’s kinda make my mouth drop open in shock at how much I remember about it. Not least of all due to the snarky dialogue that Tyke speaks, abrasive and acerbic which is impressive for a character whose 10 or 11 years old.
Written in 1977 I first read it ten years later. I’m reading it now in 2012 and it’s apparent to how different it is. Not least because of the greater freedom kids that age at that time had, speaking as a child of the eighties, as well as the lack of stuff. iPods, computers, smartphones. One car per household if you’re lucky. And teachers who could say “We shall keep you all here till we get some answers!” without having the parents ring the police and RSPCC storming the gates like a scene out of Lord of the Rings.
It actually made me laugh when Danny and Tyke go and find sheep bones in the nearby weir. Can you imagine that happening now?
First the weir would be completely fenced off with steel fencing and un-climbable paint. Then if a sheep’s remains were found in it there would be an immediate health scare for the surrounding area lest the toxins from the sheep got into the water system, and anyone who ‘saw’ the dead sheep would have mandatory consoling to help them ‘heal’ from the shocking discovery.
It could make the evening news. And if anyone from the area made it onto reality teevee they could use their grim history as inspiration for their performance.
The above line I blame on the above book for influencing my opinion and snarky speech patterns I inflict on the rest of society.
What do I remember about primary school?
Well, in the UK from 1984-90 it really was a case of midnight blue snorkel parkas which caused a big stir due to their ability to kill children crossing the road, learning to write lower case joined up writing, doing a voluntary science project with 4 other children from my class in my last year, swimming all hours of the day and night, two trips to a week-long summer camp and seeing how the school computer worked as we used it to do number puzzles with its blocky day-glow graphics.
Oh and there was a small fire in the portecabin one day.
And the snow in 1988. And hanging upside down from the steel frames of the cabins railings.
And just running about; Running, Playtime meant belting around hell-for-leather. Making up stories with my friends about anything and everything, and doing our own versions of the cartoons that were big at the time, Dungeons & Dragons, Thundercats, Jem. And covering each other in stickyweed - a weed that grew by the fence of the playground. And wrestling, and football, and hopscotch, tag, skipping, rounders.
We also had this red and black plastic mechano - the only way I can describe it - you could put it together with screws and a little plastic spanner, but these bits could make a really strong play-area for the littler kids. They loved it.
Our official outside play area was between the primary school and the nearby secondary school. The Ridings, in the nineties it was almost as bad as a Californian young-offenders institute, now it’s an Academy. The area was the cricket nets sans nets. So just a series of piped frameworks sunk into concrete then? Yep. But we still climbed up to the top of those pipes, dangling perilously above the grey stuff that could smash our heads in if we fell.
We didn’t fall. We just didn’t. you learnt not to. If in doubt, don’t climb up there in the first place.
When we used to go on swimming trips to the local baths. We could all swim, me and another girl Helen Church could ‘really’ swim so we were doing our own thing down the deep ends of the pool while the rest of the class learned doggy-paddling. I remember the first pool we went in was a weird ‘above ground’ affair. The local one, again shared with the secondary school and the village was unfinished so we went to one a few minutes’ drive away. Next to a hill with a tree at the top me and my friends got into trouble for wandering off - it was a habit when I was little - but when we got inside the poolhouse it was a little bizarre. You had to walk up steps to get into the water because the pool itself was at eyelevel. According to my mom the name of the place was Brockridge. One of South Gloucestershire’s many swimming pools that we run down to ruin in the late eighties and never redeveloped.
The biggest bit about any trip was the coaches. These were just standard seventies coaches with brown upholstery and no seat belts.
While not as bad as highschool transport - they were minibuses with bench seating, you sat facing each other with all your gear in the middle, no seatbelts, if we’d crashed it would’ve become a meatgrinder - it was still unbelievable no one thought of safety for the children in question. I’m still surprised UK buses don’t have seatbelts as standard, especially the two level ones. They flip or go under a low bridge and it really can be lights out for all on board.
Christmas parties, school assembly and plays that everyone was involved in, even the kids who couldn’t act (like me for example).
We didn’t have computers. Heck, we didn’t even have compulsory homework! We had projects to do, and I remember having all my friends over one summer doing some project on gardens and pond life. all five of us around the dining table scribbling, drawing and writing stuff longhand. I had books, dolls, GI Joes, and stuffed animals as toys. I think even then I was making up stories about things. We all have invisible worlds inside us, mine came to life when I went into my grandpa’s garden prior to his death in 1987, overgrown as it was.
This was better than growing up over the last ten years.
There’s more safety but less freedom. I don’t know if that’s a good exchange but I’m glad I got to experience The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tyler first-hand, rather than just read about it.